Critical Fanonism

Author(s): Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Reviewed work(s):
Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Spring, 1991), pp. 457-470
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Critical Fanonism

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

This book, it is hoped, will be a mirror.

-FRANTZ FANON, Black Skin, White Masks

One of the signal developments in contemporary criticism over the past

several years has been the ascendancy of the colonial paradigm. In con-
junction with this new turn, Frantz Fanon has now been reinstated as a
global theorist, and not simply by those engaged in Third World or subal-
tern studies. In a recent collection centered on British romanticism,
Jerome McGann opens a discussion of William Blake and Ezra Pound with
an extended invocation of Fanon. Donald Pease has used Fanon to open
an attack on Stephen Greenblatt's reading of the Henriad and the inter-
disciplinary practices of the new historicism. And Fanon, and published
interpretations of Fanon, have become regularly cited in the rereadings of
the Renaissance that have emerged from places like Sussex, Essex, and
Birmingham.'
My intent is not to offer a reading of Fanon to supplant these others,
but to read, even if summarily, some of these readings of Fanon. By focus-
sing on successive appropriations of this figure, as both totem and text, I

1. See Jerome McGann, "The Third World of Criticism," in Rethinking Historicism:

Critical Readings in RomanticHistory,ed. Marjorie Levinson et al. (New York, 1989), pp. 85-
107, and Donald Pease, "Toward a Sociology of Literary Knowledge: Greenblatt, Colonial-
ism, and the New Historicism," in Consequencesof Theory,ed. BarbaraJohnson andJonathan
Arac (Baltimore, 1991).

Critical Inquiry 17 (Spring 1991)

? 1991 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/91/1703-0007$01.00. All rights reserved.

457
458 Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Critical Fanonism

think we can chart out an itinerary through contemporary colonial dis-

course theory. I want to stress, then, that my ambitions here are extremely
limited: what follows may be a prelude to a reading of Fanon, but does not
even begin that task itself.2
Fanon's current fascination for us has something to do with the con-
vergence of the problematic of colonialism with that of subject-formation.
As a psychoanalyst of culture, as a champion of the wretched of the earth,
he is an almost irresistible figure for a criticism that sees itself as both
oppositional and postmodern. And yet there's something Rashomon-like
about his contemporary guises. It may be a matter of judgement whether
his writings are rife with contradiction or richly dialectical, polyvocal, and
multivalent; they are in any event highly porous, that is, wide open to
interpretation, and the readings they elicit are, as a result, of unfailing
symptomaticinterest: Frantz Fanon, not to put too fine a point on it, is a
Rorschach blot with legs.
We might begin with a recent essay by Edward Said, entitled "Repre-
senting the Colonized." To Jean-Francois Lyotard's vision of the decline
of grand narrative, Said counterposes the counternarratives of emergent
peoples, the counternarratives of liberation that Fanon (as he says) "forces
on a Europe playing 'le jeu irresponsable de la belle au bois dormant.'"
And Said goes on to argue:

Despite its bitterness and violence, the whole point of Fanon's work
is to force the European metropolis to think its history togetherwith
the history of colonies awakening from the cruel stupor and abused
immobility of imperial dominion....
I do not think that the anti-imperialist challenge represented by
Fanon and Cesaire or others like them has by any means been met;
neither have we taken them seriously as models or representations of
human effort in the contemporary world. In fact Fanon and Cesaire
-of course I speak of them as types-jab directly at the question of
identity and of identitarian thought, that secret sharer of present
anthropological reflection on "otherness" and "difference." What
Fanon and Cesaire required of their own partisans, even during the

2. A properly contextualized reading of Fanon's Black Skin, WhiteMasks, the text to

which I most frequently recur, should situate it in respect to such germinal works as Jean-
Paul Sartre's Rflexions sur la question Juive (Paris, 1946), Dominique O. Mannoni's
Psychologie de la colonisation (Paris, 1950), Germaine Guex's La N?vrose d'abandon (Paris,
1950), as well as many lesser known works. But this is only to begin to sketch out the chal-
lenge of rehistoricizing Fanon.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is coeditor of Transition, a quarterly review,

and the author of Figures in Black (1987) and The SignifyingMonkey(1988),
which received an American Book Award.
 Critical Inquiry Spring 1991 459

heat of struggle, was to abandon fixed ideas of settled identity and

culturally authorized definition.3

I've given some space to these remarks because it is, preeminently, in pas-
sages such as this one that Fanon as global theorist has been produced.
And yet some have found cause for objection here. Reading the pas-
sage above, they say that given the grand narrative in which Fanon is him-
self inserted, it seems beside the point to ask about the extent to which the
historical Fanon really did abandon all fixity of identity; beside the point
to raise questions about his perhaps ambivalent relation to counternarra-
tives of identity; beside the point to address his growing political and phil-
osophical estrangement from Aime Cesaire. Fanon's individual specificity
seems beside the point because what we have here is explicitly a composite
figure, indeed, an ethnographic construct. It's made clear by the formu-
laic reference to Fanon, Cesaire, and "others like them." It's made clear
when he writes, "of course I speak of them as types": to which some read-
ers will pose the question, why "of course"? And they will answer: because
the ethnographer always speaks of his subjects as types. Or they find the
answer in Albert Memmi, who explains that a usual "sign of the
colonized's depersonalization is what one might call the mark of the
plural. The colonized is never characterized in an individual manner; he is
entitled only to drown in an anonymous collectivity."4
Thus, while calling for a recognition of the situatedness of all dis-
courses, the critic delivers a Fanon as a global theorist in vacuo; in the
course of an appeal for the specificity of the Other, we discover that his
global theorist of alterity is emptied of his own specificity; in the course of
a critique of identitarian thought, Fanon is conflated with someone who
proved, in important respects, an ideological antagonist. And so on.
These moves are, I think, all too predictable: and, yes, even beside the
point. Said has delivered a brief for a usable culture; it is not to be held
against him that his interest is in mobilizing a usable Fanon. Indeed, this is
his own counternarrative, in the terrain of postcolonial criticism. But
Said's use of Fanon to allegorize the site of counterhegemonic agency
must also be read as an implicit rejoinder to those who have charged him
with ignoring the self-representations of the colonized. Homi Bhabha's
objection that Said's vision of Orientalism suggests that "power and dis-
course is possessed entirely by the colonizer" is typical in this regard.5
Certainly Bhabha's own readings of Fanon are the most elaborated
that have been produced in the field of post-structuralism. And his read-

3. Edward W. Said, "Representing the Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocutors," Crit-

ical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989): 223.
4. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfield (New
York, 1965), p. 85.
5. Homi K. Bhabha, "Difference, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism,"
in The Politics of Theory,ed. Francis Barker (Colchester, 1983), p. 200.
460 Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Critical Fanonism

ings are designed to breach the disjunction Said's essay may appear to
preserve, that is, between the discourse of the colonized and that of the
colonizer. For Bhabha, colonial ambivalence "makes the boundaries of
colonial 'positionality' -the division of self/other-and the question of
colonial power-the differentiation of colonizer/colonized-different
from both the Hegelian master/slave dialectic or the phenomenological
projection of Otherness."6 Accordingly, he has directed attention to (what
he sees as) the disruptive articulations of the colonized as inscribed in colo-
nial discourse, that is, the discourse of the colonized. Bhabha's reading
requires a model of self-division, of "alienation within identity," and he has
enlisted Lacanian psychoanalysis to this end:

[Minority discourse] is not simply the attempt to invert the balance of

power within an unchanged order of discourse, but to redefine the
symbolic process through which the social Imaginary-Nation, Cul-
ture, or Community-become "subjects" of discourse and "objects"
of psychic identification.7

From Fanon, he educes the question, "'how can a human being live
Other-wise?"' And he juxtaposes to his reflections on Black Skin, White
Masks the following remarks of Jacques Lacan's:

"In the case of display ... the play of combat in the form of intimida-
tion, the being gives of himself, or receives from the other, something
that is like a mask, a double, an envelope, a thrown-off skin, thrown
off in order to cover the frame of a shield. It is through this separated
form of himself that the being comes into play in his effects of life and
death."8

Bhabha may be Fanon's closest reader, and it is an oddly touching per-

formance of a coaxing devotion: he regrets aloud those moments in Fanon
that cannot be reconciled to the post-structuralist critique of identity
because he wants Fanon to be even better than he is. Benita Parry has
described Bhabha as proffering Fanon as "a premature poststructuralist,"
and I don't think Bhabha would disagree.9
In this same vein, Bhabha redescribes Fanon's "Manichean delirium"
as a condition internalized within colonial discourse, as a form of self-

6. Bhabha, "Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority

under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817," in "Race,"Writing,and Difference,ed. Henry Louis
Gates, Jr. (Chicago, 1986), p. 169.
7. Bhabha, "Difference, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism," p. 200.
8. Bhabha, "Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition," foreword
to Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London, 1986), p. xxv; hereafter abbreviated
"RF."
9. Benita Parry, "Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse," OxfordLiterary
Review 9 (Winter 1987): 31; hereafter abbreviated "PCT."
 Critical Inquiry Spring 1991 461

misrecognition. "In articulating the problem of colonial cultural aliena-

tion in the psychoanalytic language of demand and desire, Fanon radically
questions the formation of both individual and social authority as they
come to be developed in the discourse of Social Sovereignty" ("RF,"p.
xiii). Fanon's representation "turns on the idea of Man as his alienated
image, not Self and Other but the 'Otherness' of the Self inscribed in the
perverse palimpsest of colonial identity" ("RF,"pp. xiv-xv). It's interesting
to note, however, that Bhabha's mobilization of Lacan stands as an explicit
correction of Fanon's own citation of Lacan in Black Skin, WhiteMasks.
Here, then, is the originary irruption of Lacan into colonial discourse
theory. With reference to the mirror stage, Fanon writes:

When one has grasped the mechanism described by Lacan, one can
have no further doubt that the real Other for the white man is and
will continue to be the black man. And conversely. Only for the white
man The Other is perceived on the level of the body image, abso-
lutely as the not-self-that is, the unidentifiable, the unassimilable.
For the black man, as we have shown, historical and economic realities
come into the picture.'1

(Hence for the delirious Antillean, Fanon tells us, "the mirror hallucina-
tion is always neutral. When Antilleans tell me that they have experienced
it, I always ask the same question: 'What color were you?' Invariably they
reply: 'I had no color"' [BS, p. 162 n. 25].)
Bhabha cautions, however, that

The place of the Other must not be imaged as Fanon sometimes sug-
gests as a fixed phenomenological point, opposed to the self, that rep-
resents a culturally alien consciousness. The Other must be seen as
the necessary negation of a primordial identity-cultural or psy-
chic-that introduces the system of differentiation which enables the
'cultural' to be signified as a linguistic, symbolic, historic reality.
["RF," p. xviii]

In other words, he wants Fanon to mean Lacan rather than, say,Jean-Paul

Sartre, but acknowledges that Fanon does tend to slip:

At times Fanon .... turns too hastily from the ambivalences of identi-
fication to the antagonistic identities of political alienation and cul-
tural discrimination; he is too quick to name the Other, to personalize
its presence in the language of colonial racism. ... These attempts ...
can, at times, blunt the edge of Fanon's brilliant illustrations of the
complexity of psychic projections in the pathological colonial rela-
tion. ["RF," pp. xix-xx]

10. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 161 n. 25; hereafter abbreviated BS.
462 Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Critical Fanonism

Bhabha is charmingly up front about the pulling and pushing involved in

turning Fanon into le Lacan noir; he regrets the moments when Fanon
turns to "an existentialist humanism that is as banal as it is beatific" ("RF,"
p. xx). Indeed, Bhabha's rather passionate essay, entitled "Remembering
Fanon," can as easily be read as an index to all that Bhabha wants us to
forget.
For some oppositional critics, however, the hazards of Bhabha's
approach may go beyond interpretive etiquette. Thus, in a prelude to his
own Lacanian reading of colonial discourse, Abdul JanMohamed takes
Bhabha to task for downplaying the negativity of the colonial encounter;
and not surprisingly, his critique pivots on his own positioning of Fanon.
JanMohamed writes: "Though he cites Frantz Fanon, Bhabha completely
ignores Fanon's definition of the conqueror/native relation as a
'Manichean' struggle-a definition that is not a fanciful metaphoric
caricature but an accurate representation of a profound conflict." "What
does it mean, in practice, to imply as Bhabha does that the native, whose
entire economy and culture are destroyed, is somehow in 'possession' of
colonial power?" he asks. JanMohamed charges that Bhabha asserts "the
unity of the 'colonial subject"' and so "represses the political history of
colonialism." "
The critical double bind these charges raise is clear enough. You can
empower discursively the native, and open yourself to charges of
downplaying the epistemic (and literal) violence of colonialism; or play up
the absolute nature of colonial domination, and be open to charges of
negating the subjectivity and agency of the colonized, thus textually repli-
cating the repressive operations of colonialism. In agency, so it seems,
begins responsibility.
But of course JanMohamed does not argue that colonialism com-
pletely destroyed the native's culture. Conversely, it can't be the case that
Bhabha ignores Fanon's discussion of colonialism's self-representation as a
Manichean world, since he explicitly reflects on what Fanon calls the
"Manichean delirium." But certainly Bhabha's different account of coloni-
alism makes it unlikely that he posits a unity of the colonial subject in the
way JanMohamed construes it, for Bhabha's account denies the unity of
either subject in the first place. Properly reframed, JanMohamed's argu-
ment might be seen as another version of a critique of Lacan advanced by
(among others) Stephen Heath, who argues that "the importance of this
idea of the Other [as the "locus" of the symbolic, which produces the sub-
ject as constitutively divided] and the symbolic is crucial to Lacan exactly
because it allows him to abstract from problems of social-historical deter-

11. Abdul R. JanMohamed, "The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of

Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature," in "Race,"Writing, and Difference, pp. 78, 79;
hereafter abbreviated "EMA."
 Critical Inquiry Spring 1991 463

minations."12 As against Fredric Jameson's famous injunction, then,

Lacan's motto would turn out to be: Never historicize, never explain.
But far from turning against the psychoanalytic model of colonial dis-
course, JanMohamed's concern is, of course, to advance an explicitly
Lacanian account of these discourses. To be sure, the allure of Lacan for
both Bhabha and JanMohamed is only tangentially related to its appear-
ance in Fanon: as I've suggested, Lacan's discourse exemplarily maps a
problematic of subject-formation onto a Self-Other model that seems to
lend itself to the Colonial Encounter. On the other hand, it's unclear
whether JanMohamed really wants to make space for all the distinctively
Lacanian ramifications spelled out by Bhabha.
For his part, JanMohamed reinstates the notions of alterity that
Bhabha rejected. "Faced with an incomprehensible and multifaceted
alterity," he writes, "the European theoretically has the option of respond-
ing to the Other in terms of identity or difference" ("EMA,"p. 83). Here,
the Other exists as such prior to and independent of the encounter; but a
little further we find the limits of the Lacanian register in JanMohamed's
analysis: "Genuine and thorough comprehension of Otherness," he
writes, requires "the virtually impossible task of negating one's very
being" ("EMA," p. 84). This "virtually impossible" encounter is neither a
provisional, negotiated difference nor the Lacanian Other in whose field
the self must constitute itself. Rather, it is a close encounter of the third
kind, involving the disputed notion of radical alterity.'3
And the duality supports his division of colonialist literature into the
two categories of the imaginary and the symbolic. In the imaginary text,
the native functions as mirror-though in fact as a negative image. The
symbolic text uses the native as mediator of European desires, introducing
a realm of "intersubjectivity, heterogeneity, and particularity" ("EMA,"p.
85) as opposed to the infantile specularity of Otherness that the imaginary
text enacts.
While this use of Lacan to demarcate literary categories has uncertain
value as a means of classifying colonial literature (it has been criticized as
crudely empiricist), it has appeal in classifying postcolonial theorists. Here
one might station JanMohamed's penchant for Manichean allegories in
the imaginary register, Bhaba's negotiations in the symbolic. I suppose (to
continue the conceit) we might cast Fanon as the Other that mediates
between them and the historical Real.

12. Stephen Heath, "Le Pere Noel," October,no. 26 (1983): 77.

13. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak may keep him company here: "No perspective critical
of imperialism can turn the Other into a self, because the project of imperialism has always
already historically refracted what might have been the absolutely Other into a domesti-
cated Other that consolidates the imperialist self" (Spivak, "Three Women's Texts and a
Critique of Imperialism," in "Race,"Writing,and Difference,p. 272). The "absolutely Other"
here seems to be something we find (or fail to find), rather than make. I should stress that
it's not the notion of otherness as such but of absolute otherness that I want to question.
464 Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Critical Fanonism

Yet the most problematic feature ofJanMohamed's theorizing is what

critics describe as an overly mimetic conception of oppositional literature.
Here we should turn to a recent overview of colonial discourse theory by
the radical South African expatriate, Benita Parry. In the course of her
explicitly Fanonian critique ofJanMohamed's study, Parry finds him lack-
ing "Fanon's grasp of the paradoxes and pitfalls of 'rediscovering tradi-
tion' and re-presenting it within a western system of meanings. What for
Fanon is a transitional process of liberating the consciousness of the
oppressed into a new reality, JanMohamed treats as the arrival of the
definitive oppositional discourse" ("PCT,"p. 47). In fact, she is concerned
even more with the critique of alteritism as pursued in the work of Bhabha
and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Parry asks: "What are the politics of proj-
ects which dissolve the binary opposition colonial self/colonized other,
encoded in colonialist language as a dichotomy necessary to domination,
but also differently inscribed in the discourse of liberation as a dialectic of
conflict and a call to arms?" ("PCT,"p. 29). Thus Parry says of Bhabha's
reading that it "obscures Fanon's paradigm of the colonial condition as
one of implacable enmity between native and invader, making armed
opposition both a cathartic and a pragmatic necessity" ("PCT,"p. 32). (To
be sure, Fanon also spoke of the metaphysics of the dualism as "often quite
fluid" [BS, p. 10].)
Of both Spivak and Bhabha, Parry asserts: "because their theses
admit of no point outside of discourse from which opposition can be
engendered, their project is concerned to place incendiary devices within
the dominant structures of representation and not to confront these with
another knowledge" ("PCT,"p. 43). Considering the subaltern voice to be
irretrievable, they devalue the actual counternarratives of anticolonialist
struggle as mere reverse discourse. But what Fanon shows us, according to
Parry, and what "colonial discourse theory has not taken on board," is that
"a cartography of imperialist ideology more extensive than its address in
the colonialist space, as well as a conception of the native as historical sub-
ject and agent of an oppositional discourse is needed" ("PCT," p. 45).
To such positions in contemporary theory, Parry contrasts what she
implies is a more properly Fanonian critical mode, one that
also rejects totalizing abstracts of power as falsifying situations of
domination and subordination, [and in which] the notion of hegem-
ony is inseparable from that of a counter-hegemony. In this theory of
power and contest, the process of procuring the consent of the
oppressed and the marginalized to the existing structure of relation-
ships through ideological inducements, necessarily generates dissent
and resistance, since the subject is conceived as being constituted by
means of incommensurable solicitations and heterogeneous social
practices. The outcome of this agonistic exchange, in which those
addressed challenge their interlocutors, is that the hegemonic dis-
course is ultimately abandoned as scorched earth when a different
 Critical Inquiry Spring 1991 465

discourse, forged in the process of disobedience and combat, occupy-

ing new, never colonized and 'utopian' territory, and prefiguring
other relationships, values, and aspirations, is enunciated. ["PCT,"
pp. 43-44]

Some people might describe this utopian moment as the externalization of

the quest romance. But note the emergence here of the familiar historicist
dialectic of subversion and containment: that power produces its own sub-
version is held to be a fact about the constitution of the subject itself. And
some will be skeptical about the notion of a revolutionary literature that is
implicit here. If Said made of Fanon an advocative of post-postmodern
counternarratives of liberation; if JanMohamed made of Fanon a
Manichean theorist of colonialism as absolute negation; and if Bhabha
cloned, from Fanon's theoria, another Third World post-structuralist,
Parry's Fanon (which I generally find persuasive) turns out to confirm her
own rather optimistic vision of literature and social action. "This book, it
is hoped, will be a mirror," wrote a twenty-six-year-old Fanon, and in
rereading these readings, it's hard to avoid a sort of tableau of narcissism,
with Fanon himself as the Other that can only reflect and consolidate the
critical self.
And perhaps we can hear a warning about the too uncritical appropri-
ations of a Fanon in Spivak's recent rebuttal to the criticism concerning
the recuperation or effacement of the native's voice. The course we've
been plotting leads us, then, to what is, in part, Spivak's critique of Parry's
critique ofJanMohamed's critique of Bhabha's critique of Said's critique
of colonial discourse.
Now, in Spivak's view, Parry "is, in effect, bringing back the 'native
informant syndrome' and using it differently in a critique of neo-
colonialism....'" When Benita Parry takes us-and by this I mean Homi
Bhabha, Abdul JanMohamed, Gayatri Spivak-to task for not being able
to listen to the natives or to let the native speak, she forgets that we are
natives, too. We talk like Defoe's Friday, only much better."'"" Thus, in
straining for a voice of indigenous resistance, we can succumb to another
quest romance, this time for the

transparent "real"voice of the native. This has so many of the proper-

ties of a somewhat displaced model in the 19th-century class-
stratified management of the culture of imperialism, that I believe
that it is my task now to be vigilant about this desire to hear the native.
Also, let me tell you that the native is not a fool and within the fact of
this extraordinary search for the "true" native which has been going
on for decades, perhaps even a century or more, the native himself or
herself is aware of this particular value. ["N," pp. 92-93]

14. Maria Koundoura, "Naming Gayatri Spivak," Stanford Humanities Review (Spring
1989): 91-92; hereafter abbreviated "N."
466 Henry Louis Gates,Jr. Critical Fanonism

So we need to reject, says Spivak, that insidious image of the native as a

parahuman creature "who is there to give us evidence that we must always
trust (as we wouldn't trust the speech of people to whom we ascribe the
complexity of being human)" ("N," p. 93).
I think this is an elegant reminder and safeguard against the senti-
mental romance of alterity. On the other hand, it still leaves space for
some versions of Parry's critique. I suggest that we try to distinguish more
sharply between the notions of cultural resistance, on the one hand, and of
cultural alterity, on the other, even as we note the significance of their
conflation. There may well be something familiar about Spivak's insis-
tence on the totalizing embrace of colonial discourse, and Parry's unease
with the insistence.
My claim is that what Jacques Derrida calls writing, Spivak, in a bril-
liant reversal, has renamed colonial discourse. So it is no accident that the
two terms share precisely the same functionality. The Derridian mot, that
there is nothing outside the text, is reprised as the argument that there is
nothing outside (the discourse of) colonialism. And it leads, as well, to the
argument that this very discourse must be read as heterogeneous to itself,
as laced with the aporias and disjunctures that any deconstructive reading
must elicit and engage. (It's in just these terms that Spivakjoins in the cri-
tique of alteritism: "I am critical of the binary opposition Coloniser/
Colonised. I try to examine the heterogeneity of 'Colonial Power', and to
disclose the complicity of the two poles of that opposition as it constitutes
the disciplinary enclave of the critique of imperialism.")'5 Indeed, I think
Spivak's argument, put in its strongest form, entails the corollary that all
discourse is colonial discourse.

But perhaps the psychoanalytic model of culture makes this a fore-

gone conclusion. When Fanon asserted that "only a psychoanalytical inter-
pretation of the black problem" could explain "the structure of the
complex" (BS, p. 12), he was perhaps only extending a line of Freud's,
which Greenblatt has focussed attention to: "'Civilization behaves toward
sexuality as a people or a stratum of its population does which has sub-
jected another one to its exploitation."'16 Freud's pessimistic vision of
"analysis interminable" would then refer us to a process of decolonization
interminable. I spoke of this double session of paradigms, in which the
Freudian mechanisms of psychic repression are set in relation to those of
colonial repression; but it's still unclear whether we are to speak of conver-

15. Angela McRobbie, "Strategies of Vigilance: An Interview with Gayatri Spivak,"

Block 10 (1985): 9.
16. Quoted in Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shake-
speare (Chicago, 1980), p. 173. See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans.
James Strachey (New York, 1962); p. 51.
 Critical Inquiry Spring 1991 467

gence or mere parallelism. Again, the Fanonian text casts the problem in
sharpest relief.
Stephan Feuchtwang has recently argued, in an essay entitled
"Fanonian Spaces," that

the use of psychoanalytic categories for descriptions of social situa-

tions has tremendous analogical virtues. One is their capacity to indi-
cate a directionality of affect in the situations, of forces mobilized and
immobilized rather than a mere disposition of intelligible elements
and their rationality. Another is their focus on the relational, truly
the social facts. Fanon does not analyze the colonial situation as a con-
tact of cultural subjects or as an interaction of interested subjects as if
they were logically prior to the situation. Instead, the relations of the
situation are analyzed to see how their organization forms cultural
subjects.17

Feuchtwang speaks of "tremendous analogical virtues": but are they merely

analogical? Further-accepting the force of the Freudian rereading-do
we really want to elide the distance between political repression and indi-
vidual neurosis: the positional distance between Steve Biko and, say,
Woody Allen? On the other hand, Feuchtwang does point to the proble-
matic relation between individual case studies and analyses of the collec-
tive state in Black Skin, White Masks. We've heard Fanon speak of the
necessity for the "psychoanalytic interpretation"; yet he subsequently jux-
taposes a notion of socioanalysis to Freud's psychoanalysis: "It will be seen
that the black man's alienation is not an individual question. Beside [the
Freudian contribution of] phylogeny and ontogeny stands sociogeny" (BS,
p. 13). Or as Memmi simplifies the question, in the preface to his classic
The Colonizer and the Colonized: "Does psychoanalysis win out over Marx-
ism? Does all depend on the individual or on society?"'8 And, of course,
the tension-which we endlessly try to theorize away-persists in all polit-
ical appropriations of the psychoanalytic.
Indeed, doesn't this tension plague our appropriation of Fanon as a
collectivized individual, as alterity in revolt, as the Third World of Theory
itself? I speak of course, of our Fanon, of whom Sartre wrote in the pref-
ace to The Wretchedof the Earth: "the Third World finds itself and speaks to
itself through his voice."'9 I speak of the black Benjamin who, as McGann
writes, presents "the point of view of a Third World, where the dialectic of
the first two worlds is completely reimagined," because he writes from
"the perspective of an actual citizen of the actual Third World."20

17. Stephan Feuchtwang, "Fanonian Spaces," New Formations 1 (Spring 1987):127.

18. Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, p. xiii.
19.Jean-Paul Sartre, preface, in Fanon, The Wretchedof the Earth, trans. Constance
Farrington (New York, 1968), p. 10.
20. McGann, "The World of Criticism," pp. 86, 87.
468 Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Critical Fanonism

So I want to turn, finally, to yet another Fanon, the ironic figure ana-
lyzed by the Tunisian novelist and philosopher Albert Memmi. Memmi's
Fanon is, emphatically, not the Fanon we have recuperated for global colo-
nial discourse theory. He is, indeed, a far more harried subject, a central
fact of whose life is his dislocation from the "actual Third World." Of
course, we know from his biographers and from his own account that
Fanon, whose mother was of Alsatian descent, grew up in Martinique
thinking of himself as white and French: and that his painful reconstitu-
tion as a black West Indian occurred only when he arrived at the French
capital. Yet at this point-again, in Memmi's narrative-Fanon loses him-
self as a black Martinican: "Fanon'sprivate drama is that, though henceforth
hating France and the French, he will never return to Negritude and to the West
Indies," indeed, he "never again set foot in Martinique."2' Yet his attempts
to identify himself as an Algerian proved equally doomed. As Fanon's
biographers remind us, most Algerian revolutionaries scant his role and
remain irritated by the attention paid to him in the West as a figure in
Algerian decolonization: to them-and how ironic this is to his Western
admirers-he remained a European interloper.
Though he worked as a psychiatrist in Algeria and Tunisia, in neither
country did he even understand the language: his psychiatric consulta-
tions were conducted through an interpreter (see M, p. 5). And the image
here-of the psychoanalysis of culture being conducted, quite literally,
through an interpreter-does speak eloquently of the ultimately mediated
nature of the most anticolonialist analysis.
Far from championing the particularities and counternarratives of
the oppressed, Memmi's Fanon is an interloper without the patience or
interest to acquaint himself with the local specificities of culture: "He grew
impatient, and failed to hide his scorn of regional particularisms, the
tenacity of traditions and customs that distinguish cultural and national
aspirations, not to speak of contradictory interests" (M, p. 5). And while
Memmi's own insertion in colonial politics is certainly complex, his ver-
sion is consistent with that of the revolutionary elite of postindependence
Algeria.
Memmi's Fanon was devoted to a dream of a third world, a third
world where he could look into a mirror and have no color: yet he lived in
the Third World, which rebuffed his most ardent desires for identifica-
tion. What remained for him, Memmi writes, "but to propose a com-
pletely novel man?" (M, p. 5).
We've seen inscribed on the Fanonian text (as well as in contemporary
colonial discourse theory more widely) the disruptive relation between
narratives of subject-formation and narratives of liberation. Here,
Memmi is quite blunt: Fanon does, on the one hand, claim an absolute dis-

21. Memmi, review of Fanon, by Peter Geismar, and Frantz Fanon, by David Caute, New
YorkTimes Book Review, 14 Mar. 1971, p. 5; hereafter abbreviated M.
 Critical Inquiry Spring 1991 469

junction between colonial representations of the colonized and the subject

of representation. But doesn't colonialism inscribe itself on the colonized?
"For that matter, is Fanon's own thinking on this point really coherent? I
too could cite a great many contradictory passages of his, where he speaks
of 'mutilation,' 'inferiorization,' 'criminal impulsion,'-results, obviously,
of colonization." Actually, Memmi goes on to say, Fanon must have seen
that the personality of the colonized was affected in these ways. But

he found them embarrassing and repulsive. This is because, like

many other defenders of the colonized, he harbored a certain
amount of revolutionary romanticism. ... As for most social roman-
tics, so for him the victim remained proud and intact throughout
oppression; he suffered but did not let himself be broken. And the
day oppression ceases, the new man is supposed to appear before our
eyes immediately.

But, says Memmi, "this is not the way it happens."22

I believe that the Antillean mirror which reflects no color at all
haunts Fanon. Memmi is surely right to locate the utopian moment in
Fanon in his depiction of decolonization as engendering a "kind of tabula
rasa," as "quite simply the replacing of a certain 'species' of men by
another 'species' of men";23so that the fear that we will continue to be (as
Fanon puts it) "overdetermined from without" was never reconciled with
his political vision of emancipation. This may be the clearest way of repre-
senting Fanon's own self-divisions, that is, as an agon between psychology
and a politics, between ontogeny and sociogeny, between-to recur to
Memmi-Marx and Freud.
Fanon's vision of the New Man emerges as a central tableau in iden-
tity politics, for us as for him. At the intersection of colonial and psychoan-
alytic discourse, Fanon wonders how to create a new identity. The
problem remains, again for us as for him, that-as Memmi remarked
about Fanon's own project of personal transformation--"one doesn't
leave one's own self behind as easily as all that" (M, p. 5).

Rehistoricizing Fanon, we can hear a lament concerning the limits of

liberation, concerning the very intelligibility of his dream of decoloniza-
tion. And while the colonial paradigm proved valuable in foregrounding
issues of power and position, it may be time to question its ascendance in
literary and cultural studies, especially because the "disciplinary enclave"
of anti-imperialist discourse has proved a last bastion for the project, and

22. Memmi, "Franz Fanon and the Notion of 'Deficiency,"' trans. Eleanor Levieux,
Dominated Man: Notes towards a Portrait (New York, 1968), p. 88.
23. Fanon, The Wretchedof the Earth, p. 35.
470 Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Critical Fanonism

dream, of global theory. In the context of the colonial binarism, we've

seldom admitted fully how disruptive the psychoanalytic model can be,
elaborating a productive relation between oppressed and oppressor-
productive of each as speaking subjects. And yet we can chart the torsional
relation of the discourses in the exceptional instability of Fanon's own
rhetoric.
But this requires of us that we no longer allow Fanon to remain a kind
of icon or "screen memory," rehearsing dimly remembered dreams of
postcolonial emancipation. It means reading him, with an acknowledg-
ment of his own historical particularity, as an actor whose own search for
self-transcendence scarcely exempts him from the heterogenous and
conflictual structures that we have taken to be characteristic of colonial
discourse. It means not to elevate him above his localities of discourse as a
transcultural, transhistorical Global Theorist, nor simply to cast him into
battle, but to recognize him as a battlefield in himself. Fanon wrote, with
uncanny and prescient insistence: "In no fashion should I undertake to
prepare the world that will come later. I belong irreducibly to my time"
(BS, p. 15). This is one proviso we ignore at our own risk.
Do we still need global, imperial theory-in this case, a grand unified
theory of oppression; or, indeed, even the whole universalizing model of
Theory that it presupposes, a model of total theory that quests for finality
and an exclusive lien on the last word? It's no longer any scandal that our
own theoretical reflections must be as provisional, reactive, and local as
the texts we reflect upon. Of course, discarding the imperial agenda of
global theory also means not having to choose betweenSpivak and Said,
Greenblatt, Pease, or Jameson, Bhabha or JanMohamed or Parry, even
Fanon or Memmi; or, rather, it means not representing the choice as sim-
ply one of epistemic hygiene. And it requires a recognition that we, too,
just as much as Fanon, may be fated to rehearse the agonisms of a culture
that may never earn the title of postcolonial.24

24. This paper was originally prepared for and delivered (in abridged form) at the
1989 Modern Language Association panel on "Race and Psychoanalysis," at the invitation
of Jane Gallop, which partly explains why my references to Fanon are largely to his first
and most overtly psychoanalytic book, Black Skin, White Masks. Since Fanon's oeuvre
receives scant attention in my paper, I should remind readers unfamiliar with his works that
early and late Fanon (say) cannot be simply conflated, and that many oppositional critics
regard the later essays to be his most valuable contribution. See, for example, Towardthe
African Revolution:Political Essays, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York, 1967). Finally, I'm
grateful to Hazel Carby, Jonathan Culler, K. A. Appiah, Arnold I. Davidson, Benita Parry,
and Henry Finder, who commented on an earlier draft, even though I have failed to
respond to their criticisms as I would have wished.